Jyväskylä University 1951-71

Aalto’s design for the campus for Jyväskylä College of Education, in the small rural town where the architect grew up, is one of the first competitions the master Modernist won as an emerging power in the early 1950s. The campus, with its late-19th-century buildings, needed to be expanded and repaired; Aalto’s scheme shows his mastery of creating an openness that allowed abundant light and landscape to become part of the buildings. With a wealth of photos and renderings, including previously unpublished material such as the competition drawings, and unrealized projects by the Aalto office. Texts by Aalto scholars Päivi Lukkarinen and Mari Forsberg.

Maison Louis Carré 1956–63

Aalto and his second wife Elissa designed Maison Carré for the Parisian art dealer Louis Carré in the mid-1950s. This volume describes the architecture of the building, the exceptional interiors and life in the house. It also includes a biographical sketch of Carré, who met Aalto at the opening of the pavilion Aalto had designed for the 1956 Venice Biennale. The friendship between Aalto, the radical experimenter, and Carré, the perfectionist patron of the arts, lasted the rest of their lives; their house is one of the most exceptional collaborations between architect and client ever built.

Göran Schildt

Alvar Aalto wasn’t just a designer and an architect, he was one of the most prodigious writers within the modern design/architecture spectrum. This unique compendium of speeches, visionary lectures, articles and other writings contains seventy-five pieces, some of which have never been published. Perfect for the Aalto aficianado or a student of architecture, the wisdom within reveals the ideas behind Aalto’s master designs, as much as it shows a man of wide-ranging and world-changing artistic influence.

Werner Blaser

Greg Lynn (Ed.)

Digital design pioneer Greg Lynn delves into the genesis and establishment of new tools for design conceptualization, visualization, and production at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s in this catalog accompanying his exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Conceived as an object-based investigation of four pivotal built projects that established distinct directions in architecture’s use of digital tools like CAD, the book highlights the dialogue between computer sciences, architecture and engineering that was at the core of these experiments. The Lewis Residence by Frank Gehry (1989–95) was prescient in exploring the power of computer rationalization in describing and fabricating sculptural tectonic elements. Peter Eisenman’s Biozentrum (1987) tested the computer’s ability to generate its own formal language using digital scripting. The scaffold-like lines of Shoei Yoh’s unbuilt Odawara Municipal Sports Complex (1990–91) and constructed gymnasium Galaxy Toyama (1990–92) were verified for integrity by computer analysis, using intensive coding and virtual testing to advance a language of minimalist structural expressionism. Chuck Hoberman’s Expanding Sphere (1992) is a finely-tuned folding polyhedron that smoothly expands and contracts, opening the way to later explorations in responsive and adaptive architecture. This volume includes conversations with the architects and key collaborators in each of the featured projects— architects, engineers, software programmers and university researchers whose interests in these nascent technologies were evident in their own practices. Each project is then presented through a selection of archival material, conveying factual and concrete information on their development through this material history. With text by and interviews with Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Benjamin Gianni, Chuck Hoberman, Greg Lynn, Kenshi Oda, Bill Record, Rick Smith, Tensho Takemori, Joe Tanney, Chris Yessios, Shoei Yoh, and Mirko Zardini. Design by Katja Gretzinger.

New Visions, New Strategies

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Esa Laaksonen

A compendium of lectures from the international architecture conference in 2005, Architecture + Art: New Visions, New Strategies looks at the fertile overlap between two competing (and complementary) disciplines. Published by the Alvar Aalto Academy, the essays explore the history of the border between art and architecture, from Aalto to Gordon Matta-Clark. Illustrated with color photographs and black and white reproductions, with a foreward by Aalto Academy Professor Eeva-Lisa Pelkonen, the thought-provoking essays strive to illuminate the mystery of overlap, from Le Corbusier to Donald Judd.

Work by Drost + Van Veen

Drost + Van Veen

Rotterdam’s Office for Architecture Drost + Van Veen offers an uncommonly refreshing approach to design. The natural landscape is a primary source of inspiration for their projects, which then take off in unexpected and original directions. This perceptively photographed book features some of the female duo’s best-known designs, including their prize-winning bridges at a business park near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, which combine slick steel and rough-hewn logs, complete with bark.

Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal & Eyal Weizman

The stories and theoretical essays collected here argue that architecture is
one of our most valuable instruments for achieving political change in real time.
Located on the edge of the desert in the town of Beit Sahour in Palestine, the
architectural collective Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) has
since 2007 combined discourse, spatial interventions, collective learning, public
meetings and legal and public policy challenges in an attempt to transform
the physical structures of domination. Across five chapters, the authors lay
out their ideological framework for action. Drawing heavily from the writings
of political philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, and the Marxist “right to return,”
the authors invite us to rethink political subjectivity from the point of view of
the displaced. New building complexes and repurposed colonial remnants are
presented through evocative architectural renderings, drawings, and collages
alongside photographic and historical research. The result is a proposal for
“the morning-after revolution.”